Video: The Goracle on geothermal temperatures

posted at 8:48 am on November 18, 2009 by Ed Morrissey

Yesterday I featured the science stylings of John Kerry, who apparently can’t do math or research in his quest to sound like Chicken Little on carbon-dioxide emissions. The self-appointed dean of the American global-warming hysteria movement, Al Gore, didn’t do much better when trying to explain geothermal energy to Conan O’Brien. Gore tells Conan that geothermal energy is plentiful, because the Earth’s core temperature is millions of degrees (via John Derbyshire):

Conan: Now, what about … you talk in the book about geothermal energy …

Al: Yeah, yeah.

Conan: and that is, as I understand it, using the heat that’s generated from the core of the earth …

Al: Yeah.

Conan: … to create energy, and it sounds to me like an evil plan by Lex Luthor to defeat Superman. Can you, can you tell me, is this a viable solution, geothermal energy?

Al: It definitely is, and it’s a relatively new one. People think about geothermal energy — when they think about it at all — in terms of the hot water bubbling up in some places, but two kilometers or so down in most places there are these incredibly hot rocks, ’cause the interior of the earth is extremely hot, several million degrees, and the crust of the earth is hot …

The interior of the Earth is extremely hot … but as Derb notes, it’s estimated to be between 5000 – 9000 degrees Celsius, not “several million degrees.” The surface of the Sun is only estimated to be 6000º C, while its core really is several million degrees Celsius. If the Earth’s core temperature was that hot, we would have had a “global warming” crisis a few billion years ago, and this debate would never have taken place.

Of course, anyone who followed the controversy over Gore’s piece of cinematic fantasy An Inconvenient Truth knows that Gore tells a lot of very convenient untruths in his quest to create a market for his carbon-trading company. However, this is just flat-out ignorance that with any other person in any other context would destroy their credibility. This is worse than Tom Cruise telling Matt Lauer that he can debunk the entire psychiatric field because he’s read a few books. If Gore can’t get this rather basic fact right, why should he be believed on anything else in the energy field?

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My sixth-grader just finished a project where she had to create a model showing the earth’s inner core, outer core, mantle and crust plus corresponding facts… apparently the six grade textbooks are WAY off.

Maybe they thought that 11-year-olds couldn’t handle such a concept as “several million degrees” so they gave them the more manageable figure of 7000 degrees for their little minds to ponder.

Je-e-e-e-esssh! Fifty years in the field as a geologist, before retirement, and now I find out I have to go back and learn it all over again. Thanks, Al.

BTW, AL, geothermal applications in the US date back to the NEW times of “In 1892, America’s first district heating system in Boise, Idaho was powered directly by geothermal energy, and was copied in Klamath Falls, Oregon in 1900″.

My father had geothermal for his house and I thought the whole point of geothermal was the fact that at a certain depth, the earth is a constant temperature no matter the season. It’s not like you are taking heat straight from the core of the earth. Good Lord, it sounds like he thinks that for ever person that uses geothermal the core of the earth decreases in temperature.

If that’s the case… he is either stupid or he thinks we are stupid.

MobileVideoEngineer on November 18, 2009 at 8:56 AM

Geothermal energy is really great stuff if you live where there are rising mantle plumes.
If you ain’t near one, you ain’t gonna enjoy a plentiful supply that will generate electricity.
That is why Iceland is a geothermal miner’s paradise-bcs it’s on the Mid-Atlantic ridge, a diverging plate boundary.
I’m not sure about how many mantle plumes are rising through the crust under, like, Kansas.
Dope on a rope, I tell ya.

New Zeland built such a plant in the 70’s BTW. Still running. Nothing new about it mister AL “I invented geothermal” Gore.

sonofdy on November 18, 2009 at 12:51 PM

And that is bcs it is conveniently located near a subduction zone.
Here in ND, not really that close-hence no future plans for a major geothermal plant.
Gore is a scientific moron.
Dr. Rodney McKay would run circles around him.

All Poly Sci students figure they know everything that is needed about the planet, and the world in general.

Yoop on November 18, 2009 at 1:12 PM

I think you’re right.
Kinda like our principle & former history teacher talking about global warming- I walked into the office one day during their conversation.
I have to leave quickly before I burst out laughing.
Mental giants these people are NOT.

We need to get comments from El Diablo, because this may cause his inferno to cool prematurely and we sure don’t want a crisis in Hell. I’m sure the Democrat House and Senate would want stimulus money designated for this entity. Can we afford any more stimulus?

Maybe we should send Gore there with a jackhammer.
Tell him to hang out in Norris Basin with it.
Punch a hold into that magma chamber, releasing the heat that is causing the globae to warm!
I should tell this to my kids today-see if they even get how stupid of an idea that is.

Wait. I got it.
Let’s restart the failed rift.
We’ll start another project Moho right in the center of it-KS somewhere?
Once we get to the mantle, we’ll induce wandering mantle plumes to roam throughout the crust, thereby creating an unlimited supply of minable plumes!
Oh how genius!
/

You know, this fantastical scientific pondering is great!
No pesky hypotheses to deal with, no facts to consider & certainly no data to analyze!
This is just like all the liberal-type politicized college classes I tried to avoid taking!

He got all confused because he took a course called Political Science. All Poly Sci students figure they know everything that is needed about the planet, and the world in general.

Yoop on November 18, 2009 at 1:12 PM

I think it is the lawyer thing also. Because the law gets to impact every field of man’s endeavour, the lawyers sometimes develop a confidence and expectation that they get to have a say on what happens in every field, and some expect their views to win the day merely because the law will allow it and they have sublimated the power drive in their psyche. They expect to have the final say.

In other words, they have confidence because as they know the law, they have power and are not automatically going to be laughed out of a conversation. Same thing with pols. And journalists. Because they have power to effect real world results in fields they have no expertise in, they naturally expect to have their views heard and respected when discussing those fields, irrespective of what they actually know.

In this respect, I would compare it to a confidence that a mother gets after a certain time–say when she is in her mid-thirties (before the teenage years). Having successfully tempered the wild passions of little ones, they develop a natural instinct for saying something and expecting it to be obeyed. Likewise for members of academia. They are used to lecturing those who do not know as much as they do, and perhaps sometimes find it difficult to understand that not everyone is ignorant or as callow as a 19 year old sophomore.

To be a pol, journalist, or lawyer is to constantly be exposed to the temptation of hubris–your opinion will be sought or listened to not because you necessarily know what you are talking about, but because you have power and a platform to make your opinion known (and perhaps to enforce that opinion). Thus you have in your mind a license to trill, so to speak, regardless of one’s actual abilities or knowledge. And so many use that license to the full.

And it should thus come as no surprise that our Mr. Gore has had his toe dipped in all three fields mentioned here–politics, journalism, and the law.

“Expert” pontificators we will always have with us, whether they be experts or no.

If the core temperature of the Earth had ever been several million degrees, there would have been thermonuclear fusion, the crust of the Earth (on which we live) would have been vaporized, any water would be reduced to nuclear plasma, and the Earth would be the smallest “white dwarf” star in the Universe.

your opinion will be sought or listened to not because you necessarily know what you are talking about, but because you have power and a platform to make your opinion known (and perhaps to enforce that opinion). Horatius on November 18, 2009 at 1:54 PM

And the mindless sheeple are the ones that give them the power.
Too many sheeple-no enough leaders.
The sheeple need a sheepdog to whip them into line.

Speaking of geothermal energy, when people were worried a few years ago about Arctic ice melting, some Danish scientists (Denmark owns Greenland) sent a submarine to explore the sea floor under the Arctic to look for minerals, and found hot springs coming from an undersea mountain range. This was a very surprising discovery, because it indicated that the Arctic ice was NOT melting due to “global warming” from above, but due to hot springs from below.

Those springs were NOT millions of degrees (maybe 200 degrees max), but if they were melting Arctic ice from below, the Goracle might want to avoid discussion of geothermal energy…

Democrats get especially confused with numbers. Obama confused ones with thousands, Gore and Clinton confused thousands with millions, and the whole Congress seems to be confusing millions with billions and billions with trillions….

The “sheeple” would do better to remember their own inner sheepdog, and whip the politicians into line, the lines of statesmen, remembering, with humility, as they do so, that if politicians often help lambs to stray, it is also often only because the flock demands it to be so.

The Tea Party movement is nothing less than the people themselves whipping themselves into line; it is a act of community self-organizing; with dedication and zeal of a kind that would be praised on high as a miraculous gift of the Gods were it to occur for a leftist cause. Instead it is vilified, proving that to be a leftist is to wish to do for the people, but not for it to be of the people or by the people, but by the elite, of the elite, as determined by the elite, and all too frequently, human nature being what it is, often only when also for the elite as well.

“’cause the interior of the earth is extremely hot, several million degrees, and the crust of the earth is hot …’
____________________________________________________________
So is the air coming out of his mouth.

The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), an organization that has recently become highly partisan in the leftward sense, recently had Al Gore give a keynote at one of their dinners, where he got a standing O and a very complimentary piece in the important journal: Science. He was described as a “Scientist” in the article. This “several million degrees” gaffe could only be made by someone who doesn’t have even a basic grasp of measurements of the physical world. And, it turns out that real scientists don’t even have a grasp of what a real scientist is. Birds of a feather …

Those springs were NOT millions of degrees (maybe 200 degrees max), but if they were melting Arctic ice from below, the Goracle might want to avoid discussion of geothermal energy…

Steve Z on November 18, 2009 at 2:28 PM

I remember laughing about that bcs all the geologists pretty much saw it coming.
A read DUH factor there.

He was described as a “Scientist” in the article.
cavman on November 18, 2009 at 4:48 PM

And that is why Science is a trash mag, not a scientific publication.
As far as I have ever known, those bozos wouldn’t know a scientist, even though many of them are.
They are the ones that evidently flunked PhD school over & over, passing only when they finally got it just right enough that they were passed on to get them the heck out of there.

You wingnuts obviously didn’t understand the all-knowing all-wise al-Gore. He uses a whole different scale for temperature than us mere earthlings: degrees Nano-nanoo. A Nano-nanoo degree is one-thousand-millionth of a Mork degree, which is whatever the Orkans say it is. So, when al-Gore says that it will be a million degrees hotter in the next decade or so, he’s merely informing us that the Orkans are going to adjust the Nano-nanoo scale upwards a teensy bit then. Well known fact.

The part of algores mind that is not severely mentally handicapped is clinically insane. I wouldn’t trust algore to know his correct mailing address. But squishy’s respect him because he was an almighty senator.

Yoop and Badger-40 we should collaborate on a “CO2 for Dummies” and “Geothermal for Dummies” books. We could write it accurately and then tell congress it will support their ideas. Since they don’t read anyway we could convince them to fund it and sent it out to all American homes. Stimulus funds you know. We would get wealthy while having a good laugh at their gullibility.

People think about geothermal energy — snortwhen they think about it at all — in terms of the hot water bubbling up in some places

Apparently the “snort” didn’t get transcribed. Gotta love that dripping disdain for all the common widdle people that don’t think of such “lofty” things. That’s why we need the Goracle.

More importantly, to hear him tell it, he wants to drill all the way down to where all the heat is at — now that we have high-tech drill bits that won’t melt at those temperatures. I guess Rosie Odonnel was right about the WTC – fire can’t melt steel!!!

What a doofus idgit. 1) Who needs to drill that far when it’s enough to just go far enough to produce the steam pressures for turning the turbines?

Just a thot; if we could drill down to where all those hot rocks are cooking at several million degrees, would we be opening a series of relief points for the molten lava to escape the interior pressures? Wonder what that’ll do for global warming as lava escapes the core at every place we drill. Just an inconvenient digression.

2) The other inconvenient truth would be the amount of resources/energy required to generate geo-thermal electricity in any old place. In some places, it could be cost effective, others hardly at all. If it were that simple, why haven’t the utilities gone to geo-thermal on their own–in the pursuit of clean, sustainable and CHEAP profits? I mean, come on! In oil producing states, we already have drillers going more than deep enough to “tap” that potential, yet the steam produced is just typically another unleveraged by-product of oil production.

3) Obviously, to tap into this “35,000″ year supply, subsidies are needed to fatten his wallet, cause the market won’t do it on its own.

“Well, Conan , let me ‘splain. Mr. Sun is having this argument with Mother Earth and she’s steamed and that blushing keeps us warm when Mr. Sun isn’t yelling at her. Now we’ve gotta harness Mother Earth’s anger by getting an ecological Judge Wapner to pool that energy community property into alimony for the few-cha. Now for the finer points of the physics involved you’ll have to ask my chief scientists Cameron Diaz and Barbra Streisand.”

Hey AL – BORE..
Since you (gag invented the internet)
havent you ever heard of google?
I suggest you learn to use it
before you open up your dumb ass liberal pie hole
that you call a communication device…
Idiot..

If it was rainin’ out…and I could hear the rain on the roof and Gore entered the room and said that it was raining out…I would suddenly doubt that it was raining. I would have to go outside and make sure that a hose was not being played on the roof to simulate rain.

From a Hot Air article by Ed Morrissey; 11/20/09Excerpt from emails released to the internet from the University of East Anglia Climate Research Unit:
From: Kevin Trenberth
To: Michael Mann
Subject: Re: BBC U-turn on climate
Date: Mon, 12 Oct 2009 08:57:37 -0600
Cc: Stephen H Schneider , Myles Allen , peter stott , “Philip D. Jones” , Benjamin Santer , Tom Wigley , Thomas R Karl , Gavin Schmidt , James Hansen , Michael Oppenheimer“……….The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t. The CERES data published in the August BAMS 09 supplement on 2008 shows there should be even more warming: but the data are surely wrong. Our observing system is inadequate.